Addendum to 'The Field Where I Died'
by ljkwriting4life
Summary: An old fic (M/S) that deals with Scully's feelings at the conclusion to the fourth season episode The Field Where I Died (not an episode everyone enjoys - I wrote this to make it more bearable and to work through some thoughts!). Enjoy :-)


Addendum to 'The Field Where I Died'

By: Lisa (LJKwriting4life)

Rating: PG

Notes: I wrote this nearly ten years ago but never posted it, and figured why not?! The Field Where I Died was never a favourite episode, but writing this did make it just that little bit better! (M/S).

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Scully was angry. She couldn't help it. She was entitled to a hissy fit every now and then, wasn't she? So composed, all the time, blah, blah, blah, bullshit! That's what it was. It was total, complete, utter bullshit! If the woman wasn't unfortunately already very dead Scully would have liked to give her a real reaming. Let's not beat around the bush Dana, she told herself. Reaming was a conservative estimate of what she would have liked to do. She would have KICKED that woman's ASS.

No, maybe not. She wanted to. Oh boy did she want to. But even if Melissa had survived, she was obviously ill. Mentally disturbed. Dissociative. Some people were more perceptive than others, some personalities were better at power of suggestion than others; that could explain her ability to appeal to Mulder's vulnerability with that story, that idea, that past-life fantasy. Right?

It was half right. Some personalities 'were' more perceptive. Some only wanted to be perceptive. Mulder was perceptive because he was studied and practised, but Scully thought he only wanted to be more. Contrary to his own opinion he couldn't know everything and he was not always right. Now, Missy had been truly perceptive. That would be Scully's sister, and not the poor woman who had killed herself that afternoon who was apparently the soul Mulder's soul loved the most.

How tragic.

Scully laughed and scratched her head as she sat on the motel room bed, the thin mattress dipping too much under her light weight. She felt a fleck of dry skin scratch off under her nails and brought herself back down to planet earth. It was all a con. It had to be. She was real. Mulder was real. Melissa as she lived had been real. Souls did not love each other. They did not choose each other. It was the antithesis of everything her science taught her to believe in. Even her faith did not show her that path. She had been raised to believe souls achieved eternal life in Heaven; they did not return to earth to continuously suffer the trials of human life, 'learning'. Learning until what, exactly?

Scully wasn't sure about anybody else, but she didn't want to come back.

Or did she? She winced as she allowed herself to objectively process her reaction to the case, or more specifically, to Mulder. If she died never having the opportunity to reach out to him the way she had wanted to so many times since she met him, and if she was somehow given the chance to return and try to do that again, would she?

The sad, pathetic truth was that she probably would. There was a romantic in there somewhere. She was not immune to the idea of a 'soul mate'. In fact, Missy her sister had said something to her once before her death about Mulder. Or 'Fox', as she got away with calling him, mostly when he wasn't around and the conversations were private. Scully had put up with the gentle teasing and provocative questions and knocked them all back, denying everything, not explaining her work or elaborating on their relationship for her inquisitive older sister.

Scully wished in hindsight that she had not been so selfish. Maybe Missy could have told her something she should know about her and Mulder, in light of what had happened in Tennessee?

Then again, she did not need to be a scientist to count. There was no way Cancer Man could have been a Gestapo during the Second World War. He had to be sixty years old in the present. Scully was happy in her sudden evidentiary triumph until the scientist in her, always needing proof to back up a statement, actually did start counting back sixty years from the year in which she sat. Her small, smug smile gradually turned into a frown and then a pout.

She did not know exactly how old the cigarette smoking bastard was. After all, smoking was ageing. He could have been a few years shy of sixty and if that were the case, he could have been in Poland in the very late thirties or early forties...just. It would be close. Shit.

"Shit," she whispered. Her one piece of good, factual evidence she thought she could rely on blown away. It wasn't even that good. It was weak; she was reaching for something, anything to try to explain what had happened. To explain why she would now forever be relegated to the category of 'friend' in Mulder's mind. Hell, Mulder's idea of her was already sullied. No, not sullied; that word just reminded her of his apparent Civil War 'persona'. Ruined was a much better term. Destroyed.

It had not been long ago Mulder had called her 'mom', in jest of course, but she was sure that meant he saw her as some sort of mother figure. And why wouldn't he? His own mother didn't really give a shit, far as she could tell and from what little she knew, and Scully was always following him around, keeping him alive, and laying a friendly hand where necessary. She certainly tended to his scrapes and bruises with loving care. Or not loving. Not like that. Not really. Maybe just a little. Okay, a lot.

Thanks to Mulder's little hypnotherapy session he now saw her not only as a mother, but as a father. Great! So in the past few months she had suddenly acquired the identities of mother, father, colleague and friend. Of course those labels weren't all bad. She liked taking care of him. It pissed her off to no end most of the time but she had not lied when she said she would change nothing of their time spent together. She enjoyed being his colleague, she got a sick sort of pleasure out of keeping him in line and, as she saw it, making him a man due more respect from his peers than he had enjoyed prior to her assignment with him. Above all she enjoyed being acknowledged by him as her friend. They had been friends almost from the start in some ways, but it was rarely voiced.

Still, it did not sit with her. It felt incomplete. She felt incomplete. She wanted more. Listening to him speak about another woman the way he did had cut at her. He really believed it. He believed they had been lovers. She could picture them together and it hurt. How the hell was she meant to compete with the soul he had apparently loved for all eternity? Had she always only loved from a distance? Had she CHOSEN to always love from a distance? How was that fair to her or to Mulder?

She remembered the tears in his eyes and his voice as he had spoken of her death, her death as his father in Poland. Very believable, of course. She had wanted to comfort him, but at the same time she had thought of her own father's death. Which relationship would have been more important to Mulder in that time? His father, or his husband 'Melissa'? And was 'her' father and what he had stood for more important to her than any prospective lover? Maybe not. She had defied her father's wishes without his knowledge with the few boyfriends in her youth; he certainly would never have approved of the majority of those relationships which were with men closer to his age than hers.

Scully gnawed at her thumbnail as she worked over the emotions she still felt in her head. Maybe it was a good thing, if it was true and she had always been somebody who kept Mulder safe from a position other than lover. If, and it was a big if, if the whole situation was as Mulder believed it to be, that meant she had always been connected to him on at least some level. That was a sweet idea.

Sweet, and romantic trash.

She could not allow herself to get sucked in just like the members of that cult. It only took one appealing idea, something to gently caress the desires and promise the dreams of a human and they would surely follow. Everyone was open to suggestion when vulnerable.

Scully did not want to follow Mulder into his fantasy trip; she wanted to remain with both her feet on the ground but more than that, she refused to believe that in the present life she was owed nothing more than the status quo.

A knock came on her hotel room door and Scully sighed as she stood up. She cracked her neck from side to side and smoothed her hands down her dirty suit. Opening the door, she kept the rickety chain in place for security. Not that a flimsy old chain would stand up to the brute force of an alien bounty hunter or even perhaps a simple madman; luckily neither were on the current agenda.

Scully was surprised to see Mulder. She had expected him to isolate himself and grieve for the loss of his soul mate, who in Scully's mind was just a woman he had never really known. Scully felt sad so many people had lost their lives that day, it was senseless, but the loss of no one person was felt more greatly by her than any others. Mulder was different; he had lost the love of his life.

Pity.

"Mulder," she gushed in shock. Her eyes widened and she blushed when she realised she sounded like her mother. Or was it his mother? She shut the door and released the chain before opening it again. Mulder walked in as she stepped aside. "I wasn't expecting you," she mumbled, enclosing them in the stuffy, cheap room.

Maybe it was fate or the dip in the mattress looked inviting, but Mulder sat exactly where she had been sitting on the bed. Scully felt stupid at the way her heart fluttered. Stupid, stupid, she repeated to herself, focussing on the broken man in front of her. Mulder was real, she repeated. This was real.

"I dunno why I'm here," he whispered. He sounded lost, and Scully's stomach dropped as she crossed the beige carpet and knelt in front of him on the ground. She rested her hands nervously on his knees and was pleased to discover when she searched for his eyes that because he was sitting with such a hunched form she did not have to look up too high. With the arrogant way Mulder spoke to her sometimes it was hard not to feel subservient being so short. Her attitude and intelligence usually made up for the physical disparity between them, but neither had the energy for attitude that night. There was a dull throb beginning in her head from the stress, the fear, the confusion. She just wanted to sleep it off. She did not want to fight him on faith. She promised herself she wouldn't.

"I'm glad to see you," she offered. Scully had to stop herself visibly rolling her eyes. What the hell kind of comment was that? 'I'm glad to see you?' Oh well, while she was in a truthful mood she may as well come out and say the other silly sentence that had popped into her mind. She may as well see where it took them. She had nothing else. "I'm sorry things weren't different, Mulder."

It could have meant a hundred things. I'm sorry you didn't get there sooner. I'm sorry she wasn't strong. I'm sorry you didn't meet her before. I'm sorry she died. I'm sorry I didn't believe you. I'm sorry I do believe you. I'm sorry there wasn't more time. I'm sorry I can't keep my mouth shut.

Her apology meant none of those things. Mulder heard it. He heard the quiver in her voice she had hoped he wouldn't. His eyes looked so green, she realised as he stared into her own blue eyes. They seemed so much darker at other times, but not anymore. His lips turned up at the edges briefly but the smirk was overcast by a deep, curious frown and the piercing expression of a prodigal profiler reading her mind and probing her thoughts.

"Different how?" he asked. Scully turned her head away. What was she meant to say? The truth, again? She had tried that and now that she thought about it some more, the truth sucked. She did not want to admit the truth. That would make her weak. It would make her reliant upon his beliefs. She would lose her standpoint on the case. She could lose so much more. "Dana?" Mulder pressed.

Oh God, not 'Dana', she thought with a sigh. She could almost refuse him nothing when he called her that. Almost. Well screw it; if he was going to get personal then two could play at that game.

"Fox," she whispered seriously as she stared back into his face. He flinched visibly and if it was possible his cheeks paled even further. He suddenly looked terrified. She hadn't called him Fox in years. It was almost an unspoken agreement. To Hell with agreements though. Scully was over all that, at least until she calmed down. She was sure they looked calm enough on the outside, sitting opposite each other, staring and speaking in hushed tones, but if the race of Scully's heart or the haunted look in Mulder's eyes were anything to go by they were anything but calm on the inside.

"Don't call me that," Mulder whispered. He did not sound angry and Scully shrugged.

"Why not?" she asked. It was strange, she realised. She had never asked before. She expected Mulder to hold back but he didn't. Maybe she was not the only person suddenly unable to lie.

"After my sister was taken it almost seemed to mean something when they said it," he mumbled.

"Your parents?" she pressed.

"Parents, then others. Anyone. It always means something. Put it this way Scully, I never hear anything good, underneath, when people call me that."

"Not even when I say it?" she asked, trying to hide the desperation in her voice. His eyes flicked to hers and Scully felt like he was reaching inside her, right through her eyes, holding her in front of him. He was not pulling her closer or pushing her away, he was just holding, watching. Absorbing. This is the most intimate conversation I've ever had, she realised with a start, blinking hurriedly to clear her thoughts. The most intimate conversation and yet not with a lover, not even close.

A friend though. Her best friend. Didn't that count for anything?

"Scully," Mulder sighed. Scully felt the connection broken as soon as he spoke her surname and glanced at his knees, to where her fingers lay still against his long pants. She almost throbbed with the severance and she shut her eyes to stop the onslaught of tears. There was no reason to cry. "Different how?" he asked again. The man was single-minded, that was for sure. Scully sighed.

"It's nothing," she assured him, opening her eyes.

"You're sorry for nothing?" he asked. This time he did smirk, maybe even smiled, and Scully felt silly returning a much wider smile than the one offered to her. She shrugged, shy. "Tell me," he urged. "Please?"

Now THAT expression Scully could not deny. Goddamn him and his beautiful face.

Scully was a spiritual person, maybe in a more conventional way than Mulder, but she knew the tug of one soul on the other and she felt that with Mulder in a way stronger than she felt with any other living being she had ever met. He was followed very closely by her parents, but that was different, it was a different sort of feeling. Yet if she believed it was Mulder's soul that held her captive when he stared at her so intently, was she then bound to believe in the rest? Because no old boyfriend, no friend, could hold her attention like Mulder could. Her heart, he already held.

The scientist cried from within that she was wrong, that nobody held her heart but her. She exhaled and pushed herself up from a kneeling position. Her knees ached as she stood. She was not twenty anymore, and the carpet was thin. She began pacing as her internal conflicts raged. Mulder simply watched her. He hadn't forgotten the question and there was no escaping it. He was not moving.

"I suppose," she began, flapping her hands around her hips as she struggled with her words. "I was trying to empathise with you Mulder."

"Empathise," he repeated slowly. "I want to know what part you were empathising with? You don't believe in any of it, so it doesn't mean anything anyway." Scully felt the tears stinging her tired eyes again as she turned to stare at him, dumfounded and hurt by his cold accusation.

"How can you say that?" she asked, her voice barely above a whisper. "Mulder, since when do you give a shit what I believe in? How would you know what I can and can't 'mean' or care about?"

"You told me," he stated, his answer simple and clear. He looked up at her, confused as she gaped at him. "What's going on, Scully?" he asked.

"This is ridiculous," she sighed, rubbing her forehead with tense fingers in the hope of easing the headache that was forming. He could be so thick; she may as well give up. "I didn't mean anything."

"Yes you did. I'm not leaving until you tell me."

"Fine!" she snapped suddenly. She had very little patience left. He could be so trying. She glared at him as she felt anger raise a flush on her fair cheeks. She put her hands on her hips and enjoyed the rare opportunity to see him have to raise his head to look at her for a change. "You want to know?" she pressed. He nodded, pouting in the way that made her insides melt, again. In the heat of the moment it only made her angrier. "I meant that I was sorry something obviously went wrong with your little fate-plan and you got stuck with me instead of her, because I know you probably would rather I was her right now considering you two could pick up right where you left off, and that's all I meant okay? I'm sorry that you thought she meant something to you and that she's gone."

Mulder stared at her with an open mouth for what felt like an hour. Scully was afraid to look away or sit back down. Eventually, his lips parted as though he was about to speak and he frowned deeply. He saw or heard or felt the truth she had not spoken; she was sure of it when he did next speak.

"How could you think you mean less to me than her?" he asked. His voice was so gentle, soft but confused. She ached with want and fear for what the disbelief in his voice could really mean. She wanted to hear that voice forever. She wanted to tell him everything, but it was too much, she wasn't ready. Don't, she told him with pleading eyes as he prepared to press her. Not this. Not now.

"How can you think I don't want things just as they are?" he continued instead. The question caught Scully off-guard and she froze, speechless. Mulder saw her eyes flicking hurriedly as she struggled. "Scully," he continued, standing. He suddenly towered over her again and she looked up. He was directly over her. His hands came to rest on her shoulders as though he was holding her together. Maybe he was, she thought when his eyes grabbed hers again. She did not breathe for a second too long and felt her knees buckle. Unfortunately before she had an opportunity to right herself so did Mulder and his fingers dug into her upper arms as he held her up. "Scully, are you okay?" he asked.

She pressed a palm to his chest, feeling his panicked heart hammering, and gave him a gentle push.

"Give me some space, Mulder," she ordered, trying to keep her voice as neutral and friendly as possible. "You're too close." In more ways than one. Mulder stepped back and gestured for her to sit on the bed. She crossed her arms defensively and shook her head. "I'm fine," she insisted softly.

"You said you wouldn't change a thing," he told her. She looked at him doubtfully. He looked so innocent. Suddenly it did not matter that he was heads taller than her; she felt like the tall one.

"I know and I meant that," she promised. "I guess what I'm saying, what I'm asking, is would you?"

"No," he answered without hesitating. "I mean I...I don't know." Scully sighed.

"You don't have to tell me what you think I want to hear."

"I don't know what you want to hear," he told her quickly. "Is that what you wanted to hear?"

"Mulder I have a headache," she mumbled. He smirked but it was true and when she shut her eyes and again pinched her forehead she thought Mulder believed her. She would take something before bed, and hopefully it would go away. They were starting to get really annoying. She wasn't that stressed, surely. But still, the evidence was in the physical reaction. The headache was there to stay.

"Sit down," Mulder urged, taking her elbow and forcing her back to the bed. She complied, reluctantly until he sat beside her, bringing them almost eye to eye. She peered up at him warily.

"I don't know what I want to hear, Mulder," she stated. "I don't know what to make of all this."

"Don't you think it's amazing?" he asked wistfully. Scully frowned and ignored the ache behind her eyes. She shook her head, more confused by his mood swing than anything else. What was he ON?

"Amazing?" she asked. Mulder smiled and rested a hand on her knee.

"I may have lost Sarah, Melissa today but it comforts me to know you're with me," he told her. She bit her lower lip, still confused but starting to feel a little better at his touch and his words, even if they were simply concessional. Mulder continued. "It makes sense to me. I think it's...a good thing."

"How can it be a good thing when if this is true, I never save you, and you never save me?" she asked. "How does that comfort you at all?"

"Everybody dies, Scully," he reasoned. "But maybe we help each other; maybe we're here to help each other-"

"You know what bothers me?" she asked, interrupting him before he started into a spiel.

"What?" he asked softly.

"If it's true," she began cautiously. "It means that over and over we are pitted against the Cancer Man. We never win. Evil always defeats us and our deaths at his hands condemn us to repeat the lives, over and over, and Mulder we won't ever win. It would mean that we have never been allowed to be happy, we have never been allowed to grow old and just 'live', free of the evil in this world. Cycles like that, they aren't broken."

"How do you know?" he asked hopefully. "I don't think it's something negative. If you found the person you were meant to be with, the soul who was the other half of your own, are you saying you wouldn't keep trying? That once would be enough? Life's too short, Scully. It's always too short. To have the chance, to know that it's not the end with that person when they go, or when you go, it's...something to cherish-" Mulder drifted off when Scully shut her eyes. She knew a tear was drifting down her cheek and that he must have seen it. Sure enough, he reached up to brush at it with a soft fingertip. "Dana?" he asked quietly. She forced a smile to her face. He sounded scared.

"Sorry," she apologised. "I am just really tired Mulder."

"Okay," he whispered. "I guess...tomorrow, I guess I just wanted to say goodnight. Touch base."

"Sure thing, partner," she assured him, not daring to open her eyes. That's all you'll ever be, she thought dismally. Mulder stood. He frowned curiously as he stared at her. He put his hands on his hips. Something did not feel right but he didn't know what it was. She had closed herself off. Again.

"Are you going to be okay?" he asked. Scully could have laughed. Wasn't she meant to be asking him that, considering the day's turn of events? She nodded.

"I'm fine," she promised. It sounded hollow even to her. She opened her eyes but looked no higher than his waist before turning her gaze to her lap. Mulder left without another word and her front door clicked softly shut behind him. Scully leant forward and put her head in her hands as a few more tears dripped from her lower lids into her palms.

She was such a coward. He had given her the opening, but she knew petty jealousy was not what he wanted to hear. It would have confused him. He was grieving. She was not about to layer him with guilt when he was already cloaked in regret. It would make her no better than his father, his mother, his peers. She WAS better than that. She was MORE than that. She felt it. Why couldn't he?

'If you found the person you were meant to be with are you saying once would be enough?' If. If, if, if! She sighed and forced herself to sit back up. She pushed her hair back off her face and took a deep, cleansing breath. This was not how an FBI agent behaved towards her partner. She needed to distance herself, she needed to remain objective, she needed to support her partner in his beliefs even if she did not wholly believe, and she needed to stay strong no matter what. Stay whole.

But more than all that, there was one thing she really needed to say to her partner, her best friend, the man she thought she might love. Unfortunately, she was not sure whether she ever would.

Scully wanted to tell Mulder she thought she had found that person, and of course she didn't want to give up, didn't want it to be enough; she prayed life was not so short for them, but she did not want to come back. She wanted to go somewhere else to be at peace, with her sister and her dad, not be returned to a world of masks and pain and falsity.

So maybe she and Mulder would meet in a better place, a Heaven, where they could be free and experience joy together, or if, IF he was right, she was officially bowing out. He could take Melissa or whoever she came back as and live one hundred lives on earth together. She did not care how many times she might have lived. Mulder had said his soul was tired. Well, hers was too, and she just knew she could not do it again. Not even for him.


End file.
